Alevi Community-Building in Eastern Anatolia: An Ethnohistory Approach
This article probes ethnohistory as an approach for connecting historical and ethnographic data to reconstruct Alevi community formation in a long-term perspective. Historical traces of some of the sacred lineages (ocaks), which constitute the socio-religious backbone of Alevism, date back to as ear...
Wedi'i Gadw mewn:
| Cyhoeddwyd yn: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejts, |
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| Prif Awduron: | , , |
| Fformat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Iaith: | Anglais |
| Cyhoeddwyd: |
European journal of Turkish studies
2026
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| Pynciau: | |
| Mynediad Ar-lein: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Crynodeb: | This article probes ethnohistory as an approach for connecting historical and ethnographic data to reconstruct Alevi community formation in a long-term perspective. Historical traces of some of the sacred lineages (ocaks), which constitute the socio-religious backbone of Alevism, date back to as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two of these Alevi lineages are those of Şeyh Ahmed and Şeyh Hasan Onar. A variety of contemporary narratives provide competing interpretations about the origins and relations between the two lineages, the tribe of the Şeyh Hasanlılar in Dersim and the settlements that they are connected to, mostly the villages Şeyh Hasan Köyü in the province of Elazığ and Onar Köyü in the province of Malatya. Drawing on ethnohistory as method, this article brings together and orders information on these communities with a particular focus on narratives concerning their origins and historical development from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The ethnohistory approach proposed in this study integrates emic and etic perspectives, relates these perspectives and analyzes them with regard to the dynamics of community-building. Thereby, we emphasize that Alevi community-building is an ambiguous and contested process marked by complex and multivocal dynamics to which the related groups themselves as well as scholars contribute. |
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